Even in a war, someone has to take care of daily life. Someone has to feed and clothe the children.

As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.

We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.

If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.

If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

Even when we're standing at the scariest precipice ever, our soul still cries out for joy.

For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.

Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.

Do you know where you going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? Where are you going to? Do you know?

In the study, 89 percent of Americans said that they interrupted their last social encounter by looking at a phone. And 82 percent of them said that it deteriorated the conversation.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

I am, I definitely am. I'm really excited about that.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.